Erk

erkerk:

As most of you should know, wild turkeys are only found in North America (which is why Benjamin Franklin wanted our country bird to be the turkey, not the bald eagle). Also something you should know is that turkey is the main dish served at Thanksgiving.

Now what some of you may not know is that our turkeys are bred so they have bigger breasts. Sounds awesome, right? Bigger breasts means more meat when we eat them. But their breasts are SO BIG that they are unable to reproduce naturally.

Imagine trying to have sex with a girl who has boobs longer than your dick. That’s what it’s like for them.

So then how do we get more turkeys if they can’t reproduce? Simple. We artificially inseminate them. All of our domesticated turkeys are artificially inseminated one by one, using the genes necessary to produce an offspring with massive breasts for us to eat.

Kind of gives “turkey baster” a whole new meaning, doesn’t it?

And that’s what i learned in school today.

Bringing this back for turkey day. Gobble gobble, motherfuckers!

Sure, sea otters are cute when they’re asleep and holding hands. But they resort to some pretty nasty tricks when faced with hunger. They have been known to take another otter’s baby hostage and hold it ransom until the pup’s mom gives up her food. Yeah, not so innocent.

It’s worse than actually smoking. If you inhale the smoke drifting from a lit cigarette, you’re inhaling smoke that isn’t filtered. Cigarettes have filters (unless you take ‘em off) so the amount of smoke and tar and etc is reduced. If you’re standing next to someone who’s smoking, you’re breathing in unfiltered smoke so they’re actually doing more harm to you than they are to themselves.

What’s the point of yawning? It’s something i always wondered. Apparently, yawning helps push blood flow to your head in an attempt to wake you up slightly.

So how would this be useful? And why is it “contagious”? Well, think back to when we were hunters and gatherers. If a group of men are keeping a lookout at night, and yawning helps wake you up, then it should spread to the other men too to keep them alert. It’s a psychological instinct that tells you that you need to wake up. You need to yawn to get that blood flowing through your head so you can stay awake, so if one guy does it, everyone does it.

Yawning is a survival mechanism.

And that’s what i learned in school today.

This one’s short and ‘cause it’s TMI Tuesday.

The point where your father’s sperm penetrates your mom’s egg becomes the medial axis of your bilateral symmetry. All that means is that the sperm entry point is what is now the top of your head.

This post will explain how and why. First off, a mini microbiology lesson.

When HIV enters your body, it’s looking for a specific receptor to bind to. When it does, it binds to that cell and infects it. All diseases do this; look for the exact receptor they need to bind to. For HIV, it’s called CCR-4.

Now, a history lesson.

The Black Plague happened during the 14th century and killed 30-60% of Europe’s population. And the receptor it looks for is -gasp- CCR-4, the same that HIV looks for.

Because of how devastating The Black Death was, there were a few people born without the CCR-4 receptor (natural selection). They then passed those genes that lacked the CCR-4 receptor over the course of almost 600 years to our current generation.

So 10% of Europeans don’t have the receptor that causes the plague and HIV to bind to them, thus making them immune to both.

And that’s what i learned in school today.

As most of you should know, wild turkeys are only found in North America (which is why Benjamin Franklin wanted our country bird to be the turkey, not the bald eagle). Also something you should know is that turkey is the main dish served at Thanksgiving.

Now what some of you may not know is that our turkeys are bred so they have bigger breasts. Sounds awesome, right? Bigger breasts means more meat when we eat them. But their breasts are SO BIG that they are unable to reproduce naturally.

Imagine trying to have sex with a girl who has boobs longer than your dick. That’s what it’s like for them.

So then how do we get more turkeys if they can’t reproduce? Simple. We artificially inseminate them. All of our domesticated turkeys are artificially inseminated one by one, using the genes necessary to produce an offspring with massive breasts for us to eat.

Kind of gives “turkey baster” a whole new meaning, doesn’t it?

And that’s what i learned in school today.

Cocaine comes from coca leaves which is imported from Peru. Only one company is legally allowed to import and process these leaves in America. That’s right, it’s Coca-Cola.

Currently, they use detoxified coca leave extract so there isn’t any significant amount of cocaine anymore. But back when it was first made (1886), the formula called for a pretty significant amount of coca leaves. And that gave it the extra punch it needed to make Coca-Cola the success it is today.

That’s where the “Coca” part of the name comes from. The “cola” aspect comes from the kola nuts it uses for caffeine.

And that’s what i learned in school today.

Being born with both genitals isn’t as uncommon as you might think. Roughly 1 out of every 1,000 infants is born with both parts (it could be more). So then why don’t we see all these hermaphroditic people? Because the doctor will take it upon him/herself to decide what gender the infant should be and gets rid of one of the genitals.

A person is born with either the ability to produce sperm or egg. Depending on which one the infant can do is how the doctor decides which gender the infant should be and then either rids it of a barely formed penis, or sews up a barely formed vagina.

Now that child will grow up as one gender. But it may feel like it should be the opposite. And that could be the whole “a woman trapped inside a man’s body” feeling that transgendered people experience. Because they may actually BE a woman, but the doctor chose it wrong.

1 out of a 1,000 is a lot if you think about it. That’s a couple people in your high school who may be unaware that they were born with both parts. Or it could be you. I wouldn’t bother asking your parents because the doctor chooses the gender to spare the parents of the knowledge of having a hermaphroditic child. This “god-like” decision that doctors take into their own hands is currently being argued against, but i don’t know where that issue stands for sure.

And that’s what i learned in school today.

My professor grew up on a farm, and life can get pretty boring on a farm so he would do something to make things interesting. When cows eat fresh grass during the spring time, they build a lot of methane gas in their stomach. What some farmers do is puncture a hole into the cows stomach to let it out, but others prefer a different method as to avoid infection.

What other farmers would do is they would punch or kick the cow in the stomach causing them to burp out the methane gas. And what my professor did was the same thing, except he lit their burps on fire creating cow dragons.

And that’s what i learned in school today.

(P.S. you can make rocket horses. Think about it.)

Did you ever wonder why a dozen is 12? Seems kind of random, right? Well, this is how a dozen came to be. A long time ago, people would count on their fingers, but they didn’t just use their fingers a sole digit. Each joint in your finger counts as 1, and people used to count on their hand like so:

See? A dozen. They’d use their thumb to point at each one of ‘em as they counted. And that’s what i learned in school today.

Today, my professor mentioned why pirates would wear eye patches. I used to always think they got their eye poked out and were just covering it up, but that’s apparently not the case.

It turns out it was used to increase the eye’s night vision.

Back in the time of pirates, there weren’t really lights below deck. And if you’re coming up from a place with a light to a place of no light, your eyes need time to adjust. But with the eye patch, one eye is kept away from the light, so you just switch the eye patch to the other eye when you go below deck and you’re able to see so much better because that eye is more adapted to the darkness.

And that’s what i learned in school today.

Today, i learned about this mental condition called “synesthesia” in which a person is able to perceive colors with numbers. That means that each number is associated with a color like this:

The color each number gets probably differs from synesthete to synesthete, but i don’t know for sure. People with this form of synesthesia are usually able to do math a lot quicker than normal people because they go by colors and shades as opposed to numbers.

There’re many different forms of synesthesia like tasting words, personifying days of the week, or seeing sounds. And that’s what i learned in school today.

I learned that there’re very few differences between a male brain and a female brain. The only difference really is a part for menstruation and the startle reflex.

If you creep up behind a girl and then shout “BOO!” and grab her or something, she’ll obviously get startled.

Guys are different. We’ll get startled too, but only if we don’t see it coming. Someone can be really quiet, but if you hear their breath, or a rush of air, or anything right before they scare you, you won’t get scared.

That’s ‘cause guys have this thing that bypasses the startle reflex if they see it coming, even if it’s just half a second before it happens.

Girls do not have this thing. If they see it coming, they will still get startled (which is the point of horror movies. You know it’s coming, but you still jump.)

Now get this, there’re some gay guys who don’t have this startle bypass. They react like women. They can see it coming, but they’ll be startled anyway because it’s a reflex that they can’t control. Not all gay guys have it, but it’s been discovered that some do which shows a physiological relationship we share with women.

And that’s what i learned in school today.